Both Advanced Micro Devices and Intel Corp. are working hard these days to create low-power high-performance microprocessors for servers as power consumption and heat dissipation are becoming major problems of modern datacenters. According to Neal Nelson, an independent computer performance consultant, AMD’s Opteron HE “Shanghai” platforms are more efficient compared to low-power Intel Xeon 45nm platforms.

“The AMD-based server beat the Intel based server in our tests. We processed millions of transactions against a real database and we measured the total throughput and the total power used by the servers,” said Neal Nelson, president of the consulting firm.

The servers were tested with three different transaction workloads: a calculation intensive workload, a disk I/O intensive workload and the "idle" state when the server was powered up and waiting for transactions to arrive. The entire test suite was run twice, first with 4GB and then with 16GB of main memory.